1

SISTER APOTHECAIRE WAS drying her hair with a towel when Sister Doctor rushed into the ablutory. “He’s back,” she said.

Sister Apothecaire did not need to ask who he was. “With the girl?”

“No. With a boy. Well, a young man, I mean.”

“Do up my veil snap, will you, Sister? I’m hurrying.”

Along the stairs, they met Sister Cook. “Famished the both, malnourished the one, perhaps, though I’m not a doctor, being only the cook,” she reported. “They’re both deeply into their third helping of sausage and beans. The Superior Maunt is waiting in her chamber.”

Indeed she was. Her hands were composed upon her lap, and her eyes closed in prayer. “Forgive me, sisters,” she said when they came forward. “Obligation before devotion, I know. Won’t you sit down?”

“We hear that Liir is back,” said Sister Doctor. “We should like the chance to see him.”

“To inspect him. To meet with him.”

The Superior Maunt raised her eyebrows. Sister Apothecaire blushed. “I merely meant that it would be useful in our professional practice to know what the cause of his peculiar ailments actually was. Likewise we are quite in the dark as to the treatment Candle applied that helped him to recover so.”

“Of course,” said the Superior Maunt. “And I’m eager to know as well. But I have other responsibilities this morning. The unexpected arrivals are breaking their fast in the refectory, I believe, but I have made an appointment to counsel our other guest in the small chapel. I don’t believe I should break my appointment with her. So you will conduct the interview jointly and report to me.”

“Yes, Mother.”

She dismissed them, but then called after, “Sisters.”

They turned.

“In women of your age and station, it is unseemly to pelt so. The young men will not have left.”

“Pardon us,” said Sister Doctor. “But of course the last time we hoped to find him, he had left.”

“He hasn’t asked as much yet, but I believe he’s requesting sanctuary,” said the Superior Maunt. “I’m afraid he won’t be leaving very soon. You have time. Practice continence in your expression of enthusiasm.”

“Yes. Indeed. Quite.”

“You may go.”

They stood there. “Go!” repeated the Superior Maunt wearily.

She closed her eyes again, but this time not in prayer. The new winter was approaching. Another winter in the mauntery of Saint Glinda. Fires that would not warm her papery skin. Fruit that would grow mealy in the larder. Increased agitation among the maunts, for when there was less work in the gardens there was more gossip and bitchery in the sewing compound. There would be new leaks to repair, and ague would knock a few of the old ones into the grave. She wondered if it would be her turn.

She couldn’t hope for this. She didn’t hope for it. But the rewards of the winter season seemed richer in her childhood memories, back before she had these tiresome women to govern—the silly affectations of Lurlinemas, which even professed maunts in their strictness remembered with pleasure—the spectacle of sunlight staining birch shadows into the snow like laundry blueing—the way snow fell up as well as down, if the wind had its way—of course, the way birds returned, stitching the spring back into place by virtue of melody.

It was the gardens of her girlhood she remembered most, the earliest blossoms. Jonquils and fillarettes and snowdrops, perfect as the Dixxi House porcelain bibelots that had adorned her mother’s dressing table. She had not seen a fillarette in years, except in her mind. How sweet it was to regard!

She prayed for strength to last the winter out. These days, though, she rarely got into the fourth line of a beloved old epiphody before her mind skipped back through some pasture or garden walk of her youth.

Attend, she barked at herself, and stood with difficulty. The cold was already at work in her joints. She creaked as she readied herself for the morning conversation. Noting the raggedness of the face flannel with which she wiped her brow, she hoped that the mauntery’s guest might have come to propose a sizeable donation. Or even a little one. But this was beyond what the Superior Maunt thought it was proper to pray for, so she didn’t spend her prayer in that direction.

Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery, she said to herself, not for the first time. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That’s what makes it mystery.

 

THE FELLOWS WERE NEARLY KEELING OVER into their coffee cups. “You’ve had no sleep, you’ve been riding all night,” said Sister Doctor, disapprovingly. “It’s a dangerous track at best, and foolhardy to venture upon if you don’t know your way. Have you come from the Emerald City?”

“We’ve been round and about,” said Liir.

Sister Doctor explained that she and Sister Apothecaire had briefly tended to Liir when he’d been brought in by Oatsie Manglehand, the captain of the Grasstrail Train. “Have you any recollection of that?” she pressed.

“I know very little about anything,” he said. “I’m useless, pretty much.”

“Any more cheese, d’you think?” asked Trism, draining his noggin of ale.

“You were here for weeks, I’m afraid,” Sister Doctor remarked to Liir. “Without the ministrations of our community you should certainly have died.”

“Perish the thought. I’m alive, for what it’s worth.”

“What Sister Doctor is trying to ascertain, in her skittery way, is how Candle did it,” interrupted Sister Apothecaire. “She was mute as a lilac, and seemed not overly canny. Yet she managed a miracle with you.”

“Professional curiosity requires us to ask how,” inserted Sister Doctor.

“Professional jealousy requires it, too,” admitted Sister Apothecaire.

“I don’t know.” The boy had a private look. “In any event, I wasn’t consulted.”

“Oh, she leached him, she took a lancet and bled him, she sucked his poison out, and a good thing, too,” said a biddy on a bench nearby. They hadn’t noticed her there.

“Why, Mother Yackle!” bellowed Sister Doctor in a matronizing manner. “Aren’t you the chatty one today!” She shared a wrinkled expression with Sister Apothecaire. The dotty old thing. Ought to be in the solarium with the other silly dears.

“She’s got a good instinct, that Candle,” said Yackle. “The oafs are pleasant enough to bed, in their way, but it takes a daughter of Lurlina to draw out the milk only boys can make…”

“Shame and scandal on the house,” said Sister Apothecaire. “Gentleboys, forgive her. You know, their minds wander at that age, and the sense of propriety wobbles ferociously.”

Liir turned to look at the woman. Her veil was pulled forward, but the splayed nostrils of her long rude nose showed. “Are you the one who directed us to the farm in the overgrown orchard?” he said.

“She never!” said Sister Apothecaire. “Liir, she’s yesterday’s potatoes, and mashed at that. Don’t pay her any mind.”

In a low voice, almost masculine in gruffness, Mother Yackle replied slowly, “I mind my own business.”

“Of course you do,” said Sister Doctor.

“But if I were you, I’d send those soldiers’ horses packing,” continued Mother Yackle. “You don’t want them found on the premises, I’d warrant.”

Liir shrugged, then nodded.

“Look,” said Sister Doctor, “this isn’t the place to talk. Finish up, lads; we need to have a heart-to-heart.”

But Trism had fallen asleep against the back of his chair, and Liir’s eyelids were lowering as they watched. There was nothing for the maunts to do but show them to the cots in the guest quarters, and find blankets, and retreat.

2

LIIR, NEARLY ASLEEP, tossed his body back and forth on the lumpy straw of the bedding. It was as if he had been here before.

Well, he had, but in a feeble enough way. In childhood he’d been more aware of the hems of Elphaba’s skirts, of the food in the wooden bowls. An awful lot of oatmeal mush. And more recently, he’d been broken and mindless, wandering his past in a feverish state. Even the night he and Candle had left the mauntery, and she had helped him move, as good as carried him on her back down the stairs, nearly, the halls had been dark. He’d collapsed into the donkey cart and slipped almost immediately into a real sleep, a sleep of fatigue and not one of voyage.

That was his first apprehension of Candle, he remembered. A slip of a thing with the strength and willpower of a pack horse. She’d been mostly naked, and Mother Yackle had thrown a cloak over her shoulders. Here in the mauntery again, Liir tried to lean into that recent memory, the way he had learned to steep himself in other memories. Maybe there was something yet to be understood about whether he’d actually slept with her, impregnated her…even more, whether and in what ways he might love her.

Now—a thousand difficult lonely miles away from Trism, who snored a yard to the east—Liir turned over, facing the wall. Candle was a cipher to him, sweet and elusive, and the memory was frail. There was nothing more he could unpack from it, nothing useful. To distract himself, in his heart and memory he walked about and examined the hull of the mauntery, doing a kind of spectral surveillance.

The place betrayed its origins as a gardkeep. It was a fortified house, here on a slight wooded rise, an oasis of trees in the Shale Shallows. The ground floor had no windows, and the front door was reinforced with iron bracing. Behind, the kitchen looked out on a greasy moat crossed by a simple drawbridge. The vegetable plots and cow barn were beyond.

The mauntery would afford little protection in a siege. The place was tall and, at this stage in its history, unsecurable for very long. In any effort to gain unlawful access, a modern police force might be slowed, but it wouldn’t be stayed.

Still, at least a few cows could be swept into the parlor, and hay stacked up under the stairs. The fruits of the harvest crowded the shelves and larders, and the garde-manger was bulbous with blood sausage, dried muttock, and nine varieties of salami, to say nothing of cheeses. There was a mushroom cellar and a bin of desiccated fish fragments. And plenty of wine, and that wonderful rarity in a rural establishment, an indoor well.

In his dreams he checked the cupboards for rifles, he blew through each room to look for wardrobes that could be pushed against windows. He did not see the Superior Maunt asking questions of her esteemed guest about the payout schedule of a proposed beneficial annuity. He didn’t see Mother Yackle nodding in her own morning nap in the sunlight. He didn’t see nor overhear Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire squabbling gently in their shared cubicle about how they ought to proceed. The rooms were empty of novices, maunts, guests, spiders, mice, bedbugs, and any presence of the Unnamed God that he could determine.

What he saw, in the topmost room where he had lain, was a figure on a rush-bottomed chair, sitting away from the light, twisting her hands. Her dark hair was looped up on her head with no regard for neatness or propriety, just to get it out of the way. Her eyes were closed, but he didn’t think she could be praying. He didn’t know what she was doing. At her feet was a largish basket woven of twigs. He didn’t look into it; he couldn’t. Every now and then her shoeless foot would nip out from beneath the dark hem of her skirt and give the basket a little push, and because of its rounded bottom, the basket rocked for a time. Then the green foot would appear again, and start the rocking over.

 

HE WOKE WITH A START. It was sharp noon, and the house smelled of warm leek-and-cabbage eggery for lunch. Trism was still asleep, his hair rucked back against the pillow. The sound of cantering horse hoofs grew louder. Liir wanted to kiss Trism awake, but had the notion that the time for that was already over.

He did it anyway. Trism groaned, and made room, and after a while said, “We don’t do this sort of thing in our circle.”

Did he mean his class at St. Prowd’s? His family? The Home Guard? Didn’t matter. Liir replied, “Well, your circle seems to have widened, hasn’t it.”

“Or shrunk,” said Trism, reaching for his boots.

3

“THEY’RE LOOKING FOR TWO men,” said Sister Doctor.

“Indeed,” said the Superior Maunt.

“One is said to have kidnapped the other.”

“Our guests appear to be on a more familiar footing than hostage and abductor, don’t you think?”

“Well—yes.”

“So tell the soldiers we haven’t seen the men they’re seeking, and bid them good day.”

“The thing is,” said Sister Doctor, “they’re said to be quite dangerous, these fellows. In an act of desecration, they imploded the Emerald City basilica of the Emperor by causing combustible dragons to—combust.”

“How dreadful. I don’t think our two look very dangerous, though. Underfed, if you ask me, and perhaps undecided in their emotions, but not dangerous.”

Sister Doctor came back. “I’ve been told that one of the two they’re seeking is named Liir.”

“I see. Well, tell them he’s not here.”

“Mother Maunt. I question your—propriety. Is that not a lie?”

“Well, if one of the two that they seek is named Liir, one is not named Liir. So answer in reference to that one, and say he’s not here.”

“That is devious, Mother Maunt.”

“I’m old and muddled. Put it down to that, if you must comfort yourself,” she replied sharply. “But I’m still in charge, Sister, so do as I say.”

Sister Doctor came back a third time. “They are more explicit. The Commander says that they are seeking Liir Thropp, the son of the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“As I live and breathe, Sister Doctor! You extend more respect for my authority than is useful. Need I come up with every rejoinder? Are you never to think for yourself? To the best of my knowledge it hasn’t been conclusively determined that Liir is the son of the witch. So, again, since we cannot answer for certain that the person they seek is here, they must conduct their searches elsewhere. Give them my blessing and tell them to hurry, or do I have to come and do it myself?”

Sister Doctor yelled the message out the windows of the scriptorium. The Commander called back, “If you’re not harboring felons, why are your doors blocked?”

“Spring cleaning.”

“It’s early winter, Sister Thudhead.”

“We’re behind schedule. We’ve been dreadfully busy.”

“Busy harboring criminals?”

“I hate to be rude, but I’ve work to do. Good-bye.”

By late afternoon the thud of stones against the door had become intolerable, and the Superior Maunt herself came to the window. The armed contingent had to interrupt the attack in order to hear her quavery voice.

“It’s an inconvenient time to come calling,” she said. “For one thing, ladies in community tending to have their menses together, you find an entire household of terribly cross and uncompromising people. We’re not up to housing a garrison of soldiers, however rudely they pound on our doors. Please go away at once.”

“Mother Maunt,” said the Commander. “This household received its original charter from the Palace, and it is with the authority of the Palace that I come and demand access. Your studied resistance proves you are harboring criminals. We know they stayed at an inn last night, and they cannot have come much farther than here today.”

“Matters of authority are perplexing, I agree,” replied the old woman, “and I would love to stand here in the icy wind and discuss them fully, but my ancient lungs won’t stand it. Our original charter, by way of our motherchapel in the Emerald City, does comes from the Palace, I’ll concede. But I’ll remind you that the Palace in question was the Palace of the crown of Ozma, many generations back, and in any instance we have earned the right to self-governance.”

“The Palace of Ozma is long over, and it’s the Palace of the Emperor that comes calling now. He is favored by unionist acclaim, and by dint of his apostleship you are under his bidding.”

“He is a parvenu Emperor, and he does not speak for the Unnamed God to me,” she cried. “And unless he asked for it, no more would I speak of the Unnamed God to him. I reject his expedient and proprietary faith. We stand here on our own chilblained feet, without apology and without genuflection.”

“Is this an indication that the Mauntery of Saint Glinda has endorsed and even overseen the publication of recent treasonous broadsheets attacking the spiritual legitimacy of the Emperor?”

The Superior Maunt made a most uncharacteristic gesture.

“That’s hardly an answer the courts would recognize. Good Mother Maunt,” came the reply, “let us not distract ourselves with the luxury of theology—”

“For me it is no luxury, believe me—”

“I know the boy you are harboring. I met him when he was only a boy, at the castle of Kiamo Ko in the Kells. When fate brought him in my path again, not once but twice, I suspected he had the makings of a firebrand in him. I made it my business to convince him of the rightness of the Emerald City cause. He might have knowledge of Elphaba, or of her missing Grimmerie. I named him my secretary in Qhoyre. I promoted him. I fathered him as best I could. Now listen: he was not Elphaba’s match. He could not be her son—too docile and biddable. But he should give himself up regardless. He has kidnapped a soldier of the Emperor and destroyed the basilica of the army.”

“Commander,” replied the Superior Maunt, “you can save your breath. And you can put down those archaic crossbows or whatever you’re readying. We’ve got company that it would be unseemly for you to disturb.”

She turned and beckoned. A figure appeared at the window and lowered a shawl off her forehead. The glitter in the eyebrows stood out in the falling light. Commander Cherrystone made a gesture and the men dropped their weapons as the Superior Maunt intoned, “The widow of Lord Chuffrey, Oz’s former throne minister, making a religious retreat to the mauntery that bears the same name that she does. Lady Glinda.”

4

A NOVICE OPENED THE DOOR for Liir and pointed him into the simple paneled parlor, and closed the door behind him without a sound.

“I was told you were in the country,” said Liir.

“But I was,” answered Glinda. “I am. I had intended to travel from Mockbeggar Hall, our—well, my—country house to come make a bequest to this mauntery. Lord Chuffrey has left me quite wealthy, you know, and I thought it time to help the women in their good works.

“But when my under-butler arrived last night on horseback with news of the attack on the basilica, I decided to change my schedule and come here straightaway. I have a commitment to this house, and I wanted my new bequest registered before there was any move toward disestablishment.”

Her glamour was all the more ridiculous and appealing in this setting. “It’s good to see a familiar face,” said Liir.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find you here. After all, Elphaba was here for a while, you know. It’s one of the reasons I like to support it.”

“I know she was.”

“She tended the dying.”

“And the living,” he said, remembering his dream of the basket. “I’m sorry about your husband.”

“Oh, well.” She waved her hand dismissively but then dabbed at her nostril with a scrap of lacy roundel. “We largely went our own ways; it was that kind of a marriage. Now he’s gone his own way for good. I miss him more than I would ever have let on while he was alive. I suppose I’ll get over it.”

She cheered up almost instantly. “Now tell me about you. Last I remember, you were marching off to Southstairs to find some little friend or other. I lost track of what happened. Well, there was the court to manage, and various putsches to suppress.” She regarded him. “No, I suppose it was ruthless of me to forget about you as soon as you left. I’ve never been good at keeping up with people. I’m sorry.”

Liir remembered that he had momentarily hoped for Glinda as a mother. He pushed the thought aside. “You know the Emperor,” he said. “None other than Shell. Elphaba’s younger brother.”

“Wouldn’t she be surprised to know her brother had succeeded the Wizard!” She looked rueful.

“Surprised,” said Liir. “That’s one way to put it.”

“Well, yes. She’d be outraged. Piety as the new political aphrodisiac. I suppose that’s what you mean.”

He shrugged. “What someone would feel after she’s dead—that notion means little to me. She doesn’t feel. All that’s left of her—shades and echoes, and fading by the hour.”

Glinda closed her breviary with a little slap. She hadn’t been attending closely to her devotions anyway. “That pesky slogan you see scrawled everywhere is right. She does live, you know. She does.”

Liir snapped at her. “I have no truck with that kind of sentiment. All butchers and simpletons ‘live’ in that sense.”

Glinda raised her chin. “No, Liir. She lives. People sing of her. You wouldn’t guess it, being you—but they do. There’s a musical noise around her name; there are things people remember, and pass on.”

“People can pass on lies and hopes as well as shards of memory.”

“You refuse to be consoled, don’t you? Well, that’s as much proof as I could ever need that you’re kin to her. She was the same way. The very same way.”

5

THE SITUATION, the Superior Maunt concluded that evening, was decidedly unsettled. Scouting from the highest windows in all directions, the novices reported that several dozen armed horsemen showed signs of making camp in the Shale Shallows. They’d broken into the kitchen gardens and rooted about in the shed for squashes and such. “It seems unfeeling not to provide them with a meal,” said the Superior Maunt, “but I suppose that might give the wrong impression.”

Liir and Trism asked for an audience, and she sat with them on a bench at the base of a flight of steps. “We can’t have the house put in danger on our behalf,” said Liir. “Between Trism and me, while working in the Home Guard, we’ve been responsible for enough loss of life. We didn’t know the dragons would explode. We didn’t intend to bring down the basilica. We don’t know if there was human death in that catastrophe. We want to do no further damage, if we can help it. We shall give ourselves up to them.”

“Since it may ease your minds on that score, I will tell you that I heard of no loss of human life in the collapse of the basilica,” said the Superior Maunt. “It was midnight, after all. The place was deserted, even the side sheds and storerooms that escaped being crushed by falling debris. I suspect, however, your foes imagine the basilica was your real target, and the death of the dragons—how do they term it these days?—collateral damage. As to your suggestion that you should turn yourselves in, let me take it up in council before you make your decisions.”

“What is council?” asked Trism.

“I don’t know. I’m going to find out,” she replied.

 

THEY GATHERED IN THE CHAPEL, the only room in the mauntery large enough to hold all inhabitants and guests. Evening devotions usually occurred on a basis of rotations, some maunts handling kitchen washup or geriatric babysitting while the rest sank into quiet prayer or early nap. Tonight the Superior Maunt requested the attendance of all, even those retired maunts like Mother Yackle who were on the edge of gaga.

Lady Glinda, though a benefactress, refused a seat on the dais up front, and she had removed her trademark diamond strutted collar for a quieter linen ruff. Liir and Trism, unfamiliar with these traditions, stayed standing. The older maunts were escorted in, in wheeled chairs when necessary; the novices took their places on their knees until the Superior Maunt indicated they should sit. “This is not prayer,” she said. “Something like it, but not prayer, precisely.”

She sat herself down, with difficulty. After a short silence, Sister Hymnody offered a provocatory in plaintone, though her sweet bell-like voice quavered. They were all on edge.

“Sisters, mothers, friends, and family. I shall be brief. Our tradition of charity, reinforced by our vows, brings us this evening into a conflict none of us has anticipated or experienced before. However generous the tithe of Lady Glinda, I doubt it will rebuild this house should the army of the Emperor sack it.

“We are a small house, a mission post on the road halfway between our motherchapel in the Emerald City and the rest of the world. Our isolation has been the cause of loneliness, at times, but also promoted peace and protection. Perhaps even provocation—but I pass over that. Tonight we are neither isolated nor peaceful. It is a truth we must accept.

“I am an old woman. I was raised as a novice in the venerable practice of obedience. Under the rubric of our order I followed instruction, including the one that required me, years ago, to take charge of this mauntery and govern it until death.

“I still believe in obedience. Even while soldiers camp outside our walls, and quite likely call for reinforcements, I must be obedient to the wishes of the powers that placed me here.

“As I speak these words, my dear friends, I hear in them an echo of the Emperor’s remarks. He professes subservience to the highest aims and intentions of the Unnamed God. God is the mouthpiece and the Emperor is his striking arm. The First Spear.

“I have not met the Emperor, and I will not. I should decline an invitation were one offered. The Emperor has hijacked the great force of faith and diverted it to further the prosperity and dominance of the City. Who can argue with a man who has the voice of the Unnamed God speaking exclusively in his ear? Not I. I have never heard such a voice. I have only heard the echo that still reverberates, once the Unnamed God stopped speaking and the world took up with itself.

“In our house, we profess to believe that the Unnamed God has made us in its likeness and its image, and this should have enlarged us to be like the Unnamed God. I fear in the Emerald City, they have remade the Unnamed God in their image, and that has belittled and betrayed the deity. Can the Unnamed God be belittled, you ask. No, of course not. But the deity can go unrecognized, and return to mystery.”

The sisters shifted. Many of the novices were ignorant of the Emperor’s apostasy, and the shoals of theocracy were beyond their ability to navigate. The Superior Maunt noticed.

She stood. “Bring me two other chairs, one at my right and one at my left,” she said. This was done.

“The Unnamed God retreats into mystery, and is not especially localized in my heart, my dears. Nor in the Emperor’s. The mystery is as equally in your heart as in mine, and in…the spirit of the trees and the…the music of water. That sort of thing. In the memory of our elders. In the hope for the newborn.

“I break with the tradition of our house tonight, as the decisions now to be made involve your lives as well as mine. I am old; happily I would go to my sweet reward this evening were it provided me by a literal spear of the Emperor. I cannot ask the same of you. Therefore it is my wish that henceforth the mauntery—even if our residency here lasts only till dawn—shall be governed not by a single voice, but by a troika of voices. Were the disagreeables not outside our walls, I should invite your opinions and call for a ballot. Time prevents me from allowing that. In extremis, our family of maunts shall accept the leadership of three. Sister Doctor, will you rise to the chair?”

Sister Doctor gaped. She grasped Sister Apothecaire’s hand briefly, and moved forward. Sister Apothecaire trembled and moved to the edge of her seat, perching for approach.

“I shall take the second seat,” said the Superior Maunt. “I may be old, but I’m not dead.”

The room was so still that the sounds of horses whinnying and stamping outside carried through the cold.

“The third chair I am reserving for the novice known as Candle,” declared the Superior Maunt. “I have a notion we shall see her again. For how long, I don’t know. But we need the wisdom of age, the strength of the fit, and the initiative of the young. From this moment forward, my absolute command over this establishment is dissolved. I shall enter it so in the Log of the House before I retire. Now, let us see how we get on.”

Sister Apothecaire bit her lip and tried to feel more humble than humiliated.

Skirts rustled as the women shifted. Faint whispering, unprecedented in the chapel, sounded, like faraway wind. The Superior Maunt dropped her forehead into her fingers and breathed deeply, feeling that the world had changed utterly, and wondering how quickly she would regret this action.

In the stillness, Lady Glinda stood. Reticence not being her usual thing, she’d had about enough: and anyway, hadn’t the Superior Maunt called for a collaborative spirit? “If I may speak,” she began, in a tone that implied she knew she could not be denied, “even if the army breaks through the defenses of this mauntery, they cannot do you good women much harm. There will be no bloodshed or rape here. Not while I am in house. Make of it what you will, even though I am retired from what passed for public service, I am still seen as a friend of the government. I have the ear of every society power monger in the country. The army knows well enough they cannot abuse you while I am a witness—and they will not touch me. They daren’t.”

She added, “I am Lady Glinda,” in case some of the younger novices hadn’t cottoned on yet.

“It isn’t the girls that are wanted,” said Sister Doctor. “It is the boys.”

“Don’t underestimate what people in the throes of passion may do,” said the Superior Maunt. “Our rectitude means little to the world beyond our walls, and the commitment of our lives is as cheap as throwaway grain on unuseful margins of field. Still, Sister Doctor, you are right. The army seeks two young men, but they do not know for sure that they are here.”

Liir said, “I do not think the broom would carry two, but Trism could climb to the ramparts late at night, and fly to safety. That would leave only me, and whatever fate I have earned, I should face it by myself.”

The room grew decidedly chilly. “So the rumors of the broom are true?” said Sister Doctor. The Superior Maunt took in some breath wetly at the corners of her mouth.

Liir shrugged but couldn’t deny it. From the side, mad Mother Yackle called, “Of course the rumors are true. The broom came from this very house. I myself gave it to Sister Saint Aelphaba years ago. Am I the only one concentrating enough to know this?”

She might, an hour earlier, have been hushed, and the Superior Maunt began to speak. But Sister Doctor raised her hand and stayed the Mother Maunt’s comment, and remarked, “You’ve been quiet for a decade, Mother Yackle, but of late you’ve come back to yourself somewhat. Have you anything to add we should know?”

“I don’t talk when there’s nothing to say,” said Mother Yackle. “All I have to add is this: Elphaba should be here to see this hour.”

“You have an uncommon association with—the Witch of the West.”

“Yes, I do,” said Mother Yackle. “I seem to have been placed on the sidelines of her life, as you might say, as a witness. I’m mad as a bedbug, so no one needs to attend, but I’ve taken some measure of her power. Oh!—but she should be here to see this hour.”

“Mother Yackle? A guardian angel?” called Sister Apothecaire.

“Well—a guardian twitch, anyway,” replied the old woman.

Liir trembled and thought of his lack of power, once again, and of his revery within these walls. Now he remembered what he hadn’t seen before: that in the corner of the room where the green-skinned novice had sat rocking the cradle, a broom leaned against a chest of drawers.

“Are there other remarks?” asked Sister Doctor.

Shocked somewhat by the developments, the maunts muttered quietly, but no one else spoke until Sister Apothecaire stood and said, “Mother Maunt, I would like to applaud you for your courage and your wisdom.”

Tears ran suddenly from the old maunt’s eyes as her house, to a person, stood and paid their respects. Outside, the horses shied and the men started at the sudden rain of noise from the chapel windows.

 

THE BROOM, THOUGH, wouldn’t carry Trism. In his hands it was no more than a broom. “I lack the proper spunk, it seems,” he said.

“Maybe it has lost its power,” said Liir, but in his own hand the thing leaped to life again, bucking like a colt.

“We might be able to manage a sleight of hand with only one man to hide,” said Lady Glinda. “After all, as you pointed out, they are looking for a pair of you. Perhaps Trism could be passed off as my bodyguard. It was unlike me to have ventured here without a bodyguard, after all, though I did. Sometimes I like to confound even myself,” she explained. “It isn’t difficult.”

“If the men who hold us under siege recognize Trism from the barracks at the Emerald City, he will be put under arrest,” said Sister Doctor.

“Well, I used to be good at makeovers,” said Glinda. “And I could do magic with a blush brush. He’s got big shoulders for a maunt, but he’s pretty enough, and a little peroxide on the facial hair, which is so conveniently blond—” She tossed her own curls. “Well, I never travel without it.”

“I think not,” said Trism in a steely voice.

“Then we’ll have to take the chance we can pass you off as my servant,” said Lady Glinda. “Liir will leave tonight, on the broom, and tomorrow morning I shall ride out with Trism at my side, and make no explanation. If you choose then to open your doors to the soldiers, they will find nothing untoward here. I shall wait outside your gate as an obvious witness until their search is completed. If they are that hungry for blood, they will not dally here but rush on elsewhere.”

“But where will you go?” the Superior Maunt asked Trism. By now they had retired to her office, and she was sagging against the worn leather of her chair.

Liir looked at Trism. As much as could pass between them in a look, without words, passed: and another moment of possibility crashed and burned.

“If Trism can get through, he should try to find Apple Press Farm,” said Liir. “He might smuggle Candle to safety elsewhere. The Emperor’s soldiers are headed vaguely in that direction, and the site has been discovered and ripped up by thugs and vandals at least once already. It seems to have been used as a clandestine press for the printing of antigovernment propaganda.”

“Yes,” said the Superior Maunt modestly, “so I’ve been told.”

“For you, I would try to find that farm,” said Trism. “And I will take the scraped faces, that they not be found here when the army does its ransack.”

“As for me,” continued Liir, “I’ve learned something from you.” He looked at the Superior Maunt, who was tending to nod. “I promised to try to complete an exercise, and I did this much: I helped rid the skies of the dragons that were attacking travelers and causing fear and suspicion among the outlying tribes. I will finish my work before anything else happens. I should let the Conference of the Birds know that, for now, they are free to gather, to fly, to conduct their lives without that undue threat. With the help of the Witch’s broom, and unimpeded by dragon-fings, I can manage that shortly.

“Beyond that,” he said, “I have other scores to settle. I set out years ago to find Nor, a girl with whom I spent some childhood years.”

“But, Liir,” said Sister Doctor, “the Princess Nastoya is expecting your return.”

Liir started. “I had assumed she’d have died long ago.”

“She’s been trying to die, and trying not to die, a complicated set of intentions,” said Sister Doctor. “She mentioned you, Liir.”

“I don’t know what I can do for her. I do not have Elphaba’s skills, neither by inheritance nor by training.”

They sat silently as he worried it out. “In the choice of what to do next, I’m troubled. On the one hand, you say the Princess Nastoya is old and suffering and wants to die.”

“Yes,” said the Superior Maunt wearily. “I know the feeling.”

“On the other hand, Nor is young and has a life ahead of her, and perhaps it is a greater good to help her first, if I can.”

They waited; the wind soughed a little in the chimney.

“I will return to Princess Nastoya,” he told them. “I know I won’t be able to help her to sever her human disguise from her Elephant nature. I’m not a person of talents. But if I can give her the loyalty of friendship, I’ll do that.”

“You would help an ancient crone over a disappeared girl?” said Sister Doctor. Her sense of medical ethics flared.

“Young Nor found her own way out of Southstairs,” said Liir. “Whatever else has been done to her body or her mind, she clearly has spirit and cunning. I shall have to trust that her youth will continue to protect her. And maybe she doesn’t need my help now—though I won’t rest until I know it for sure. Meanwhile, Sister Doctor, you say that the Princess Nastoya has asked for me. Ten years ago I made a promise to try to help; I owe her my apologies if nothing else. And if I can report conclusively to the Scrow that it was not the Yunamata who were scraping the faces of solitary travelers, I may be able to help effect a treaty of faith between the two peoples.”

“Is it hubris to aim for such a large reward?” asked Sister Doctor.

“No,” said the Superior Maunt, her eyes now closed.

“No,” said Liir. “The Superior Maunt has shown me that tonight. If we share what we know, we may have a fighting chance. This house, as a sanctuary, may survive. The country, and its peoples, may survive.”

“The country,” said the Superior Maunt. Her mind was sliding sleepward. “Oh, indeed yes, the country of the Unnamed God…”

“The country of Oz, be what it may,” said Liir.

In a semblance of a toast to hope, they raised imaginary glasses of champagne, as the Superior Maunt began to snore.

 

SOMETIME LATER THAN MIDNIGHT, Sister Apothecaire showed Liir and Trism to an attic. A window gave out conveniently to a place where two matching peaks of roof on either side sloped together to form a valley between them. Corbelling protected this section of roof from the view of people on the ground.

Sister Apothecaire said, “Sister Doctor mentioned your intentions to me, Liir. I’m glad to have the chance to add what Sister Doctor forgot about. The Princess gave us a message to give you—but of course you had disappeared by the time we got back. She said something about Nor and the word on the street about her. I don’t recall precisely, but she has something to say to you.”

Liir reached inside the Witch’s cape. In the interior pocket, he felt for the folded-up drawing of Nor by her father. He winced at the memory of the childish writing—the chunky downstrokes, the blocky uncials. Nor by Fiyero.

Sister Apothecaire wrapped Liir’s cape the more tightly around his chest to make sure it wouldn’t flap and draw undue attention as he tried to make his escape. She tucked extra loaves of bread and a parcel of nuts into his lapels, and bade him Ozspeed. Then she retreated to give them privacy for their good-byes.

“Neither of us may make it, you know,” said Trism. “Before noon tomorrow we may both be dead.”

“It’s been good to be alive, then,” said Liir. “I mean, after a fashion.”

“I’m afraid I got you into this,” said Trism. “I saw you on the ball pitch and thought I would take my revenge on you. I didn’t mean this much revenge—either that you should die, or that we should part like this.”

“I was looking for you, too, sort of—you just saw me first,” Liir answered. “It might have been the other way round. Anyway, what does it matter? Here we are. Together a moment longer, anyway.”

After a while, Trism managed to say, “Are you sure you can fly in this condition?”

“What condition is that? I’ve been in this condition my whole life,” Liir answered. “It’s the only condition I know. Bitter love, loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It’s where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.”

They kissed each other a final time, and Liir mounted the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West, and felt it rise beneath him. He did not look back at where Trism stood. He had few talents, did Liir, and while flying a broom was one of them, he wasn’t practiced enough to risk breaking his neck.

His other talent, though, was a distillation of memory into something rich and urgent. He guessed, in the hours or years remaining to him, he would remember the effect of Trism clearly, without corruption, as a secret pulse held in a pocket somewhere behind the heart.

The exact look of Trism, though, the scent and heft of him, the feel of him, would probably decay into imprecision, a shadowy form, unseen but imagined. Hardly distinguishable from an extra chimney in a valley formed by pantiled roofs of a mauntery.